Abstract: P38.00006 : Recent developments in the physics of your sense of smell

Authors:

Andrew Horsfield
(Imperial College London)

Luca Turin
(MIT)

Yeong-Ah Soh
(Imperial College London)

Marion Sourribes
(UCL)

Marshall Stoneham
(UCL)

Lianheng Tong
(UCL)

Paul Warburton
(UCL)

A radical proposal in 1996 [L. Turin, Chem. Senses 21, 773
(1996)] was that human olfactory receptors use phonon assisted
electron tunnelling to probe the vibrational spectrum of odorants
in order to determine their chemical identity. A development of
this model [J. C. Brookes et al., Phys. Rev.
Lett., 98, 038101 (2007)] showed that this Turin mechanism is
indeed physically possible, even robust, but left a number of
questions open. One such question is: between which sites does
the tunnelling electron pass? Our recent calculations support a
particular pair of likely sites. Because of the complexity of
biological environments, probing the receptor is difficult. Thus
we have begun to investigate the properties of a semiconductor
nanowire device that mimics the key processes [A. P. Horsfield
et al., J. Appl. Phys., 108, 014511 (2010)]. We will present the
latest findings of this study.

To cite this abstract, use the following reference: http://meetings.aps.org/link/BAPS.2011.MAR.P38.6